MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]

  • 29 Posts
  • 1.14K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 30th, 2023

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  • Practically speaking, revolution can’t take the electoralist approach of campaigning to persuade people to switch sides. If the material conditions exist for socialism, then people will seek out the organization.

    I understand the issue. Where I get hung up is on this part of “waiting for material conditions”. Am I supposed to just sit around and read theory until these conditions get bad enough for 200 million+ people to want to revolt? What if they never get that bad?

    I just don’t see this happening in the U.S. and especially not where I live. People are dealing with higher rent, shitty to non-existent public transit, there’s people dying in cars or from COVID or from heart disease and other preventable things every day. There’s people working two to three jobs just to get by. More and more people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Food bank lines are growing. Homelessness is becoming more visible daily.

    The conditions near me are getting worse all the time, but they’re NOT ever going to get to the point that they did in feudal China, or Cuba, or Russia before 1917. I just don’t see it happening. FFS the masses can be miserable AF but they’ll still have Coke/Pepsi/beer, Netflix, and infinite cheap entertainment. Maybe Capitalists checkmated us with the distractions and all of the fracturing they’ve been able to manufacture among the working class?

    I just wish I know WHAT to do. No left org has a good answer. Seems like no one has quite figured out what will work, if anything.







  • I would like to see an agitprop community that does a few things:

    • Provides help/training/support to teach comrades how to design agitprop materials. How to design flyers, how to use Canva/Photoshop/GIMP/whatever, where to go for printing, editing images so they work best on Twitter or Facebook or wherever they are going, how to work with print shops, etc. We need graphic design skills!

    • Figures out through research, testing, or other means what kinds of agitprop messaging works best. I want us to collectively apply not just theory, but also knowledge of Psychology, Marketing, and other relevant fields to create messages that will have the best chance of breaking through the noise.

    • Comes up with messaging ideas that are unique for specific areas/campaigns/etc. There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all message. In the deep south U.S., for instance, I could see us creating agitprop that co-opts all of the Christian messaging all over the place. Jesus was a Socialist after all! Or go after Shen Yun which will be on tour again soon. Or produce messaging around how to actually get organized beyond attending a march for the inauguration.

    • Has a clear call to action. We may not agree on which org people should join, but I’d like all of our messaging to point to either joining a local branch of a left org or link to where people can learn more. Give people a drop of theory and then give them a chance to read more and radicalize.